IBM Opens Garage in SoHo, New York City for Cloud Developers; Targets Fintech, Blockchain and Other Fast Emerging Tech

NEW YORK, June 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ — IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced the opening of an IBM Bluemix Garage in New York City, which will help power the city’s growing concentration of developers, entrepreneurs, and fintech companies with cloud and blockchain.

The global developer population is projected to reach 25 million by 2020, according to Evans Data Corp.1 This growing community is increasingly using Bluemix Garages to tap into IBM Cloud APIs around cognitive, Internet of Things, unstructured data, social media and more to swiftly build and launch innovations. Developers are also using these Garages to accelerate the exploration of blockchain projects, which can remove friction from financial transactions and prime blockchain to fundamentally change how markets function.

The New York City location is the latest to join IBM’s growing network of Bluemix Garages around the world, which includes a location in Tokyo that is helping companies like Mizuho Financial Group explore the use of cloud and blockchain. IBM also operates Bluemix Garages in San Francisco, London, Toronto, Nice, Tokyo, and Singapore – with more planned to open in the latter half of 2016.

IBM Bluemix Garage to Spur Innovation in New York City’s Thriving Fintech Industry

IBM Bluemix Garages serve as a hub where developers, product managers and designers can come together to build on Bluemix, IBM’s cloud platform.

As the latest initiative in IBM’s commitment to New York City, the Garage will be located at Galvanize’s newly launched campus. Its location in this tech learning community for students, startups and established companies will deepen IBM’s roots in the city’s thriving tech scene, and build on IBM’s work with disruptive New York City companies such as Alpha Modus, an investment tech firm.

“Ramping up more companies on Bluemix will be a significant addition to New York City’s tech economy, as it enables financial tech companies like us to innovate with APIs such as Watson,” said Prashant Bhuyan, cofounder and CEO of Alpha Modus. “Using Bluemix, we’ve been able to roll out transformational apps that leverage cognitive analytics with unbelievable time and efficiency –helping to shake up the way our clients invest in the markets.”

Since 2014, IBM Cloud has partnered with the City of New York to power the city’s Digital.NYC platform, a hub for New York City’s rapidly growing startup economy. Currently, nearly 8,000 startups – over half of the city’s startup base2 – are using Digital.NYC to connect and collaborate. Also in 2014, the company announced the opening of its Astor Place offices, which serves as the headquarters for both its Watson and Cloud businesses.

“Galvanize has been a great home and partner for IBM’s groundbreaking Bluemix Garage on our San Francisco campus, and we are excited to bring that partnership to New York City,” said Jim Deters, co-founder and CEO of Galvanize. “Having IBM’s Garage in New York City, within the Galvanize community, allows our strong network of developers and startups to leverage the power of the cloud and the expertise of IBM to competitively innovate products and apps in the growing fintech and blockchain spaces.”

Located at 315 Hudson Street in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood, an area which in recent years has become a mecca for startups, the newest Garage will help spur innovation via:

Business Development: Combining enterprise expertise, agile methods, and IBM Design Thinking, a unique process to design, build and deploy, Garage consultants help clients to refine, iterate on and deliver a business idea into an app.

Hybrid Cloud Integration: Tapping IBM Cloud’s hybrid and open platform, Garage consultants help companies move existing data workloads to the cloud, lowering cost and adding enhancements, as well as connecting existing systems and data into new cloud apps.

Speeding App Development: Through the Garage’s expertise in agility, extreme programming, DevOps and more, Garage consultants help businesses significantly reduce the time it takes to design and build new services, applications or products.

Skills Development: Equipping development teams with the skills and expertise needed on Bluemix, Garage teams help businesses to rapidly scale cloud capabilities and implement agile development.

IBM Garages Help Clients Explore Compelling New Blockchain Projects

A new study from IBM, also launched today, describes how blockchain networks will vaporize current frictions in the economy that are inhibiting business growth, propelling the movement of capital and exchange of value. Today, a number of obstacles — such as participants of a transaction not having access to the same information, or the high price of intermediaries — add costs and complexity that drags on global business and trade.

Blockchain technology, which creates a permanent and transparent record of transactions, will reduce or eliminate these frictions, recasting our institutions and economy with far greater efficiency and less risk. This is supported by the findings in the new IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV) study, “Fast forward: Rethinking enterprises, ecosystems and economies.”

With blockchain technology, these Garages are helping drive the next wave of financial services and fintech innovation, including new mobile banking and wealth management apps, and helping to pioneer the use of blockchain in multiple areas of finance, such as capital markets and commercial and retail banking.

For example, working with the newly opened IBM Bluemix Garage in Tokyo, Mizuho Financial Group recently announced a test of the potential of blockchain for use in settlements with virtual currency. By incorporating blockchain, Mizuho will explore how payments can be instantaneously swapped, potentially leading to new financial services based on this rapidly evolving technology. For these blockchain networks, Mizuho is using the open source Linux Foundation Hyperledger Project.

IBM is actively working with hundreds of clients to understand what it takes to make blockchain ready for business. Through its open source contributions and resources for software developers, IBM is helping to advance the science of blockchain, helping to remove complexity and make it more accessible and open. Financial services, supply chains, IoT, risk management, digital rights management and healthcare are some of the areas that are poised for dramatic change using blockchain.

Bluemix, IBM’s Cloud platform, on which more than 120,000 apps are launched every month, has grown rapidly to become one of the largest open, public cloud deployments in the world. Based in open standards, it features over 140 tools and services spanning categories of big data, mobile, Watson, analytics, integration, DevOps, security and the Internet of Things.

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